Thursday, June 25, 2015

libinput touchpad gestures

One of the bits we are currently finalising in libinput are touchpad gestures. Gestures on a normal touchscreens are left to the compositor and, in extension, to the client applications. Touchpad gestures are notably different though, they are bound to the location of the pointer or the keyboard focus (depending on the context) and they are less context-sensitive. Two fingers moving together on a touchscreen may be two windows being moved at the same time. On a touchpad however this is always a pinch.

Touchpad gestures are a lot more hardware-sensitive than touchscreens where we can just forward the touch points directly. On a touchpad we may have to consider software buttons or just HW-limitations of the touchpad. This prevents the implementation of touchpad gestures in a higher level - only libinput is aware of the location, size, etc. of software buttons.

Hence - touchpad gestures in libinput. The tree is currently sitting here and is being rebased as we go along, but we're expecting to merge this into master soon.

The interface itself is fairly simple: any device that may send gestures will have the LIBINPUT_DEVICE_CAP_GESTURE capability set. This is currently only implemented for touchpads but there is the potential to support this on other devices too. Two gestures are supported: swipe and pinch (+rotate). Both come with a finger count and both follow a Start/Update/End cycle. Gestures have a finger count that remains the same for the gestures, so if you switch from a two-finger pinch to a three-finger pinch you will see one gesture end and the next one start. Note that how to deal with this is up to the caller - it may very well consider this the same gesture semantically.

Swipe gestures have delta coordinates (horizontally and vertically) of the logical center of the gesture, compared to the previous event. A pinch gesture has the delta coordinates too and a delta angle (clockwise, in degrees). A pinch gesture also has the notion of an absolute scale, the Begin event always has a scale of 1.0 and that changes as the fingers move towards each other further apart. A scale of 2.0 means they're now twice as far apart as originally.

Nothing overly exciting really, it's a simple API that provides a couple of basic elements of data. Once integrated into the desktop properly, it should provide for some improved navigation. OS X has had this for a log time now and it's only time we caught up.